The Screwball Asses

A 1973 French treatise on homosexual desire and the gay-liberation movement, long misattributed to Guy Hocquenghem and restored here to its author, Christian Maurel.

It first appeared anonymously in the "Three Billion Perverts" issue of Félix Guattari's journal Recherches, which French authorities banned on release. Maurel takes on the militant delusions and internal contradictions of the gay-liberation movement as well as the mores of bourgeois capitalism. He rejects any "pure theory" of homosexuality that would treat its otherness as revolutionary, and argues that the ruling classes invented homosexuality as a sexual ghetto. There are thousands of sexes, he says, but only one sexual desire. This second edition keeps Noura Wedell's English translation, first published in 2009 under Hocquenghem's name, and adds a preface by Hocquenghem's biographer Antoine Idier on the differing positions inside the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire.

Maurel is a writer, journalist and activist. The book is number 3 in the Semiotext(e) Intervention series.